Simple Man Guitar Tutorial

Sam.

Hey, guys. Welcome to so simple man by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I had a request from this request for this song by someone. So here you go. I'm gonna do it here. The song itself is pretty simple. The chords are C, G and A minor and that's the entire song. And it's the same chord progression over and over. It's a C chord, a G chord and an A minor chord played twice. So that's it. And it's the same for the verse, the chorus, the solo, all parts of this song. You're just gonna play that all the way through. Now, the only caveat to this song, as you might hear, my guitar probably sounds a little bit different, a little bit lower than usual. Well, the reason for that is for this song to sound like the actual song, I had to tune down my guitar half step. So what do we do? It means we put the tuner on and we make each tuning peg. Each note is going to be one half step or one fret down. So this, this note is not going to be E. This note is going to be E flat or D sharp. And then here we're going to have A flat or G sharp. Here we're going to have D flat or C sharp. Here we're going to have G flat or F sharp. The second string is going to be B flat or A sharp. And the bottom string is going to be E flat or D sharp again. So depending on your tuna, your tuna might just do sharps, it might do flats. But we're flatting every, every string by one note. Alright, so it's going to have this much darker sound than it normally would. So if your guitar is not tuned down a half step, you might want to pause the video and do that so that your guitar will sound like mine. So let's start off with the easy part of this song, which is the strumming. You can strum for the entire song. The picking in this song is a little bit more intermediate because it's not really like a standard picking pattern. There's a lot of ups and downs. And the other thing is that this song is pretty fast.

Fat fast.

It's not fat, it's fast. It's coming in at about 120 beats per minute. So it's moving pretty good with this picking pattern because it's an eighth note picking pattern. One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and so we're moving a little bit here. So when you're learning this, if you're doing the picking pattern, just go slow, take it very, very slow and work your way up. That's exactly what I had to do. So let's start with the strumming. So we're going to open up this strumming pattern a little bit by ignoring just one strum. So we're not going to play anything on the downbeat of the second beat. So we're going to go 1, 3, 4 and 1, 3, 4 and 1, 3, 4. And so for the C chord we're going to do one one progression or through the strumming pattern. So it's going to be 1, 2.

3, 4 and so that is down, down, down, up.

So it's three downs and then an up. If you want to get fancy, you can add a little 16th note in there if you want to. But I'm just gonna keep it simple here.

So again it's gonna be 1, 2, 3, 4 and.

And we're gonna do the same thing on the G chord.

1, 2, 3, 4 and.

And then A minor.

1, 2, 3, four and 1, 2, 3, 4.

And back to c. C.

1, 2, 3,4 and 1, 2, 3, 3, 4. And 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4. And 1, 2, 3, 4. And 1, 2, 3, four And 1, 2, 3, Four.

And.

And that is really the pattern you can use for the entire song if you want to use it for the intro and the verses. When all the picking's happen happening totally fine. It's gonna work even over the solos and everything. It'll work just fine. You can just do that little strumming pattern and you'll be perfectly fine. Now let's go into this picking pattern which is a little bit trickier. It's not too bad. It's somewhat repetitive. But the key here is if we're playing the chord, we're gonna hit the right notes. And even if you hit the wrong note, it's going to sound good because you're just playing the notes on the chord. We're basically just arpeggiating the chord. So we're not strumming. We're picking individual notes here. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with this pickup which is a walk up on the bass line. So we're going to start on the A string. Fifth string open. So it's just an A note. And we're going to walk up to the B note which is the second fret on the fifth string. And I'm playing that with my second finger.

So I've got Open second fret. Open second fret.

On the A string.

Open second fret.

The next one we're going to play is the third fret. When I do that though, I should already be at my C chord because the bass note, this note is the top part of my C chord.

So it's going to be open to.

C, which would be the third fret open to C. Alright, so now I'm just going to show you the C chord. So the C chord and the A minor chord in this song are picked the same way. The second A minor, we're going to do something a little bit different. Now in this song, the picking pattern does vary. If you listen to different parts and depending on the version you listen to. What I'm just going to show you is going to show you a pattern for the C chord. I'm going to show you pattern for the G chord, a pattern for the first A minor and a pattern for the second A minor. And you should be able to use that four the entire song and have no issues. So let's start with the C chord. So I'm gonna just say the string numbers because if we're playing the chord, we're hitting the right notes. So I'm just gonna use the string numbers so that we get the picking pattern because that's the most important part. So for the C chord, we're gonna start at the fifth string. We're gonna skip the fourth string and head to the third.

So it's gonna go 5, 3, back up to 4, 5. So I'm gonna pick down, down, up, up, 5, 3, 4, 5.

One more time.

5, 4, 5, 3, 4, five.

That's the first half. The second half we're gonna drop down to the B string. So we're starting on the second string and it's gonna be second string, third.

String, fourth string, third, two, three, four.

Four, three.

So if you put the whole thing.

Together, it's gonna be 5, 3, 4, 5 and then 2, 3, 4, 3 again.

Here we go.

5, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 3.

Okay, that is your C chord. Now we're gonna go to the G chord which is the same pattern except every string is gonna be bumped up. So instead of starting at the fifth string, we're gonna start at the sixth string, the top of this G chord.

And it's gonna be 6, 4.

So we're skipping the fifth string.

6, 4, 5, 6.

That's the first half again.

6, 4, 5, six.

One more time.

6, 4, 5,6.

And then the second half is going.

To be 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 4, 5, 4.

One. Last time.

3, 4, 5, 4.

Now, if we put that all together for the G chord.

We've got six, four, five, six. And then three, four, five, four.

Now, the first A minor is going to be picked exactly the same way as the C chord, but we'll go through it again. So it's going to start at the fifth string.

5, 3, 4, 5, 5, 3, 4, 5.

And then the second half is going.

To be 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3.

So if we put that all together.

It'S going to be 5, 3, 4, 5. Then 2, 3, 4, 3.

Okay, so those are your first three chords. So if I just play through it all slowly so that you can hear it. A sound like this.

All right, so that's the first three chords. The last Amar is going to be a little bit different. So we're going to start on the fifth string and we're going to jump down to the B string, second string, and then third string.

So it's 5, 2, 3.

Now, something's going to happen on the second half of this a minor chord. This Pinky is going to come down on the third fret of the bottom string. So we're going to have to pick down on this high note. So the first three notes were five.

Two, three, Pinky down five, one, two.

Again from the begin.

Five, two, three, Pinky down five, one, two.

And at the very end, we get our walk up again.

So the same walk up we started the song. And then you go right back into the C chord. So after we've got our first A minor.

Second A minor.

Right back into C.

And that would be how you would jump into the strumming.

So after that, walk up C to.

G, then to A minor.

All right? So that's how you get from that picking pattern back into the strumming. So we've got. You're a simple.

All right, so there you go. That is the picking pattern. That is the strumming pattern for Simple Kind of Man. The strumming pattern we left. Very, very simple for those of you that are beginners. But if you're more intermediate and you want to try the picking pattern, just go slow. And, you know, when I do stuff like this with my students, some of this stuff sometimes can be improvised by even the artist. So when you listen live, they might not play it exactly the same way live as they do on the recording. So I always tell students, as long as you don't stop and you keep picking, if you don't hit the right notes, it's still gonna sound good. So let me just show you. I'm gonna not look at the picking pattern and I'm just gonna play something and it might be different. It might be the same. I don't know. My fingers sometimes do what they want, but I'm just gonna hit notes and it should still sound good. It might not sound exactly the way the song does, but, you know, most people really won't notice unless they're, like, super fans and they've memorized every note. But.

So you see, I just. I did little things. I threw in some hammer ons, some different stuff. I wasn't always picking all the eighth notes. But if you did that when you started singing, no one would really know the difference. If you were performing it live, most people wouldn't. But if you want to be a perfectionist and do it like this, be the perfectionist. But if you're looking to perform it, just practice.

If you make a mistake, just keep going. You're trying to get this the speed up. Work on going fast. Don't work on getting all the notes perfectly. Just work on going and keep that picking hand moving.

And I messed up pretty bad there. Don't lose your timing. If you lose the timing, people will know.

So just keep going.

If you hit a bad note, don't worry about it. Just keep going. Try and stay in that timing. Stay in that pocket and keep going and take your time with it. Start very, very slow and then work up the speed much quicker. Go even slower than we went in this video. So there you go, guys. That's simple, man. And I hope you guys enjoyed it. And I'll see you, see you in the next video.